


The necessity of catching a chill

by lulahbelle



Category: J. Edgar (2011)
Genre: Confused Emotions, M/M, Shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 21:39:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1833181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulahbelle/pseuds/lulahbelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keeping a secret from the world means you need to keep secrets from everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The necessity of catching a chill

**Author's Note:**

> -Awful title but it seemed fitting.  
> -Very very minor Clyde Tolson/OMCs  
> -I am pretty sure I started this before the film even came out - that's how long I've had this knocking around unsure of it.  
> -I liked the fact that Clyde was ambiguously/unambigously a gay man in the film and just wanted to think for a second how that would have worked for him given that he was operating in such homophobic times.  
> -But I hated the fact that the film decided to deny the sex between the men, so I wanted to write a sex scene between them, but at the same time I couldn't imagine it happening easily or happily.  
> -Sex might get a bit purpley but I lack all objectivity at this point.

Clyde read the paper as he ate his breakfast. Usually he would just glance, scanning the tight type for mention of Edgar but this morning his eye fell over the first block of the society announcements too and stopped, his attention held by the information there.

 _Saturday the 18th..._ he read... _Miss Fiona Regan-Meyers of Fairley County married Mr Christopher Deacon also of Fairley County, alumni of George Washington University..._

Jealousy and disbelief surged intertwined making his stomach lurch with sickness.

He tried, at once, to control his response, to repress it as excessive, unecessary, but without will his eyes darted over the picture of the couple, frantically looking at the bride, then over her name again, seeking to remember her as his head filled effortlessly with memories of the groom.

Chris.

Cypress Park Avenue, lemon light and the trickling shadows of trees in the breeze. The first time, their voices were brought in low, intimate use, so their faces had to be so close to be heard. That second time with him. Midnight dark, the tickle of fingertips, a spray of humid breath gusting his ear, making gooseflesh on his upper arms, bringing everything up, making him excited and tense, then, when it was done, so very happy and relaxed, as if finally there was something suitable about his soul.

*

No.

That life was done now, he told himself, it had no power over him anymore. Nothing he told himself was true.

As he stripped off and showered, thoughts of Chris Deacon went on, running and jumping around in his head.

His face, his hair, his eyes, Clyde's envy and shamelessness.

Whilst drying himself Clyde closed the medicine cabinet above the sink until its mirrored door showed him his face.

He winced at the flush in his cheeks.

*  
Clyde walked to work that day and when he arrived got to his files at once. He did not breathe a word of his thoughts to Edgar, all too easily able to imagine his judgement. Edgar who had excised all but the most high of human baseness.

He could imagine the evidence of his utter disreputableness, typed up, collected, stapled together and assembled into a file like the ones profiling bad guys in his hands.

He felt such shame.

*  
After work he and Edgar would often get dinner out, then sometimes they would go to a club.

In the dark of the chosen spot that evening there was a bronze skinned boy serving drinks. Bent as a nine dollar bill he was from the swish of his hips, and attracted to Clyde he was from the gaze of his eyes.

Clyde regarded him with the quiet disgust he always turned upon effeminate men. The sort of fiery disapproval that only minimally concealed a baser interest.

In gaps of conversation with Edgar about their important, manly things, their duties, their importance, their power and the increase of these things, Clyde found his eyes drifting toward the boy, monitoring, spying, compiling evidence, but of what, the sordid immorality of his lifestyle was already clear enough.

All the same Clyde went on, staring at him.

He had pretty eyes the boy, especially in league with the lithe lines of his body.

When their appraisal of one another struck synchronous and they found themselves for just the briefest second staring at one another, Clyde received a lascivious wink from the boy. Risky, entirely for him. Calling him.

From that moment forth a flame was lit in his belly, in his mouth, a desperation for touching that did not die down all evening.

It had been something like that that Clyde always remembered when he thought about what had turned him queer.

He remembered a Scout visit when he was 13, where one of the instructors, a grown man, with a wife, had spent hours just looking at him that way.

How powerful and very wretched it made him feel inside to want to look back as he had done, silently willing the man to approach.

It was probably this that inspired his earliest favour of law enforcement. For what did the helplessly immoral do to cover up but don the appearance of utter moral obstinacy.

At the end of the night He feigned fatigue and slipped away from Edgar, Edgar fussed over him in his cold way worried and it disturbed Clyde how easily he reassured Edgar, lying with such disinterest.

As his door clacked shut his blood was hot, bubbling heat radiating from his skin. His cock throbbed and he gave it a consoling squeeze and just like that, he was drugged, needfully remembering Chris' whispers against his lips, the Latin boy's winking, imagining a warm mouth pressed into the hollow of his throat, stubble scratching him.

Closing his eyes, so tired that doing that made him dizzy, he unzipped his fly.

It was a vigourous stroke from the instant. The first time he had done it in the longest and it took no time at all.

His guts felt meltingly light and he could not decide whether it was a good sensation as it felt, or bad as it should have been. All Clyde knew was that when he put his head to the pillow he was out for the count and when you were as dirty as he you valued peace above notions of good or bad.

Clyde woke up the next morning tense, with want to touch burning in his guts, in his groin - that disgusting area that he'd learnt to cooly overlook and disregard until now.  
It was dark but he got up and got out, to run through the jet air until the heat was in his leg muscles and chest and nowhere near that area. He ran until he was too exhausted to dare think of doing it again.

*

As he bathed he heard the sounds of Edgar letting himself in.

*

He sat on the ground at Edgar's shined, black, shoes, who did not spread his legs to accomodate him just swung them both primly to one side. With Edgar it wasn't about what he did, it was always about what he didn't do and when Clyde passed him a towel he did not desert him.

*

Clyde had flashbacks of the first time Edgar had done this for him, tentatively reached out to him towel over hands to dry him. Then it had been Clyde aching to reassure him without words that it was ok to touch him.

Edgar had confessed that first time, feeling it pertinent, "My mother always used to dry my hair, long after the time when I could well do it myself."

"Mine too," Clyde had said, trying not to smile overly hard at the fact that Edgar touched him.

"Well when you love someone you want to make sure they don't get a chill," Edgar had said remotely, assuring that this gesture was born of love in his heart but that he saw his mother's love as far in advance of anything he had ever received from any other soul all in the same strange comment.

That first time Clyde had to teach Edgar how to touch by winding around him in clean happiness like a cat, and Edgar was not so lazy or insensitive that he hadn't learnt, so now when Clyde set himself down before him he patted the back of Clyde's shoulders with the towel in earnest.

*  
"You're so broad," Edgar had once whispered to Clyde admiringly as he stood behind him, in an Autumn month of a year not reclaimed when it passed.

A year where they both knew but did not know how to be with the knowing.

*  
His fingertips, hidden beneath a towel until they were clumps, crept up to dry Clyde's hair, digging in at first, then as if second guessing the enthusiasm withdrew to an stiff almost too tense pat.

All the same it was such a god damned relief to be touched.

Edgar's stiff ministrations through the down soft caress of the bath sheet, were soothingly familiar. Then at once, in a vaulting rush, not merely soothing but inciting.

Clyde could feel his breath shallowing, a shiver trickling down his spine, he tried to ignore it.

"You've been out," Edgar said.

"Since 5. I recently got back in time for a bath before you came."

"You're waking up earlier and earlier for these runs," Edgar commented.

Clyde almost faltered to think that Edgar knew why he did, sure that he must, but he was too used to feeling the paranoia of guilt to give it much credence and continued to distract him.

"Well I have standards of physical fitness to adhere to Edgar," he said.

"They are for the men Clyde, not for you, besides you far exceed the current fitness requirements, there is no need to do anymore, yet every morning I come here for breakfast and you've been out."

"Well I figure that as I'm your most important man that the rules go double for me."

Edgar sternly disagreed with what Clyde said and was not inclined to take up the smile he gave him, his eyes suspicious.

There was no arguing that Edgar would really accept, he treated Clyde much as Clyde saw his mother treat him, with great faith, excess of concern, indulgence, then fierce harshness and judgement alternately and he would never back down from either random reaction once he had decided upon it.

Though it was clear he was not convinced Edgar was at least silent, a courtesy that Clyde had earned, an affection if you will, for he would argue fiercesomely with just about everyone else, about anything else.

"It aids me to run. I think a lot when I run," Clyde said.

"Thinking you can't do in the house?"

That Edgar knew, what he could not know, pulled a thick tether and Clyde turned to him and examined his eyes, unable to see anything sure about what he should do, for wanting to tell the truth and wanting so desperately to never have to admit something so tawdry and avoidable as lust as his truth.

He turned back from Edgar who continued sopping his hair, knowing well enough how right he was, just waiting patient for Clyde to confirm it.

"What do you think of?"

"Different things. Today I was thinking of a friend I used to have. I saw a notice in the paper, he got married on Saturday." Clyde quirked his head at the end as if this were just something that happened, something he barely cared about and was slow to think that this made no sense after his confession that he'd been thinking about it.

Edgar was onto the parts where logic didn't knit together at once.

"You were not invited to his wedding?"

"No."

"And this was one of your, close friends?"

"Closest I had before you Edgar."

"Well why were you not invited to his wedding?"

"I have no idea, you would have to ask him," Clyde said, shifting, meaning to get up and away.

Edgar settled a heavy hand on his shoulder forbidding him to move.

"You are afraid I will not care for you if I know, why not?" Edgar said, his stare incisive.

"Is that a risk? If I had done things, in the past, without knowing they would cause you displeasure now, would you forgive me?"

"Of course Clyde. I feared myself for long that I would not care for you one day. For a long time I rather hoped I would not, but there is something of you, when all deeds are done with, you somehow always emerge even finer to me."

"I am glad of that Edgar I feel the same for you," Clyde said solemnly.

"You should not be so sad Clyde, you are an integral piece in one of the most powerful organisations in this entire United States. The country. You are a fine example of a man."

"I know Edgar. Sorry, I'm grateful for your patience with me."

Clyde knows what this will elicit and moves toward it.

Edgar kissed him on the forehead, 'just a brotherly kiss, you understand', he had said the first time he did it.

This time he rested his weight there a little longer than usual and in that unexpected second of warmth all the isolated sparks of excitement in Clyde's body were resurrected and multiplied, with the consequence that he could feel his cock heating, filling with blood, pushing outwards beneath his towel, his stomach lurching with pleasure.

He pushed forwards at once, up, away.

"Where are you going, sit awhile with me."

"I need to go to the bath," He said through the loud panic in his brain.

"But you just came from there did you not?"

He saw from the corner of his eye his eager, aching erection jutting the terry towelling. Though he burned to do so, he presumed he would only make it more noticeable if he clamped hands over it, so he did not do this, he just pleaded, "Edgar, I must go."

Edgar looked into his face at that, took in his expression of panic.

Clyde tried to keep his eyes there, hoping it would avoid his sight resting lower down, but it was a lost cause and all too soon Edgar's small, dark eyes were focused between his legs.

He was not instantly disgusted, perhaps unsure what he saw at first and the moments and seconds that elapsed without his reaction seemed queasily like acceptance. Clyde's stomach swam with arousal, his whole body hot, his cock hardening even more, treacherous and dirty in its continued hope, despite every chastisement of his mind.

He despaired and gripped his hands over it. The touch sent sharp pulses of pleasure up his spine letting him know he was close so he took his hands away once more and then, turning, said, "I'm sorry. Edgar I need to go."

Edgar was on his feet at once, quicker than Clyde had ever seen him move.

He stood and his fierce darkness, his intensity, held Clyde still as he reached out and unhooked his towel from concealing him.

So shocked was Clyde was but so needy for touch that his hands dropped limply to his sides.

Edgar stepped closer, stood so his small, suited body crowded his nakedness, he ran an exploring fingertip over his arousal, plump and mistakenly proud on his belly.

Clyde whimpered, his cock leaping to his command.

He wanted to move away, aware only of transgression occuring between them and the price Edgar made others pay for enabling him to cross their lines but it was as though Edgar had a vice grip on him, he could not move for the iron of his will that he stay there and receive this, whatever it was.

Edgar gripped his cock easily enough, mouth parted, his expression so full of intense sensuality that Clyde flushed, afraid he might kiss him and had to steel himself against even so much as the attempt.

The fingertips of Edgars other hand were pattering all over the surface of his belly, stroking the muscle, tapping a code to inflame the sparks roiling up in there more and more with each rough tug of his hardness.

"Uh Edgar," Clyde moaned and he felt despicable, like he had led him to badness and sank his head, taking the striping, flaring pleasure of his boss' working hand like some punishment.

"Uh...I will..."

Edgar drew him off still, hard, his grip tightening to utter harshness as the way became slick with the wet of his arousal. Clyde could cry it felt so good.

With a molten pulse in his spine that let strands of sensation up the muscles of his back spread and burn and clench tight, his aching finally released in Edgar's fist, spraying jets of white up his belly and chest.

In the haze of satisfaction Clyde said, "Edgar I can..." reaching slow for the bulge he now noticed he had caused in Edgar's pants.

So enthralled was he in the dream of by finally letting himself unravel entirely, loosen off into his friend that he jumped severly when Edgar boomed in his loudest voice, "Go to your shower at once Mr Tolson!"

Clyde was barely steady on his feet again before Edgar assured him stern. "Do not come to work today and if you ever refer to this incident again we shall not speak again.

Clyde was still with confusion.

"Do you hear?" Edgar asked.  
Clyde nodded then, aware that Edgar wanted something more of him from the insistent cold focus in his eyes.

"Yes sir."

"Leave!"

Behind the door to the bathroom, covered by his mess Clyde wasn't sure whether this was a solution to his problem or the expansion of it.


End file.
